Bacon Stupidity Month – An Interview with Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson’s Bacon Stupidity Month (BSM) is into its ninth glorious all-meat day as of the writing of this article. For those of you just joining us, BSM is the title given to the month of February, 2009 by Mike Nelson of RiffTrax and is so-named because he has pledged to eat nothing but bacon, beer, wine, martinis, water and coffee for all 28 glorious, carnivorous days.

BT landed an interview with Mr. Nelson on Friday and we talked about BSM, eating bacon at a Friend’s house and the RiffTrax site. The full audio from the interview is embedded below, and we’ve also posted the full text of the interview so you can read along while you listen.

Mike Kirsch: Great, thanks for joining us. And we’re interviewing you today because, as you’ve made it clear to the world, you have embarked on “Bacon Stupidity Month.” In your words, what is that?

Mike Nelson: Well, it’s as stupid as it sounds. I just vowed that for the month of February 2009, I would eat nothing but bacon. And I’m in my sixth day of it, and I’ve held true to it.

Mike Kirsch: Have you? So, nothing but bacon all day, every day?

Mike Nelson: No. Except I did make a few exceptions just so that I wouldn’t go mad and so that I could visit other people’s homes without them throwing me out.

Mike Kirsch: [laughs]

Mike Nelson: When you make the request, “Yeah, I’ll come over to your place, but I’m just going to have to have bacon and water and nothing else,” it tends to throw a damper on it. So I’m allowing myself the occasional cocktail, as well as coffee, and I don’t drink much beer, but occasionally I might have a beer. But that’s it.

Mike Kirsch: That’s right, in your original article about this, you said, “beer, wine, martinis and water.” And now you’ve got coffee. Those are your five beverage allowances.

Mike Nelson: Yeah. I didn’t want anything that would imply or that anyone could infer that there was anything healthy being snuck in there. There might be those who argue that beer is sustaining, but I can assure you I don’t drink enough that it would actually keep me going. It’s only the bacon that’s keeping me going.

Mike Kirsch: That’s great. And you also said that you refuse to do a “Super Size Me” type of diary about your adventures here. Why is that?

Mike Nelson: Well, I just didn’t want to… Frankly, I’m too lazy to go get, like, blood work done and all of that stuff, and I also didn’t want to confront a doctor with it because I knew that he would just look down on me with scorn and he would probably have me locked up. I’m sure there’s some federal agency of bacon abuse that could somehow get me locked up.

So I wanted to avoid any officials of any kind, because they won’t understand. They don’t love bacon the way it should be loved. And therefore, their minds are clouded and they think that bacon is actually bad for you, when we of course know the opposite is true.

Mike Kirsch: I can assure you that if there is not a federal agency of bacon abuse, that Bacon Today will be happy to start one and make sure that it’s there to protect the sanctity of bacon. [laughs]

Mike Nelson: Well, if that’s the intent I’m all for it. I’m just worried about any sort of government regulation on the consumption of bacon. Because, you know, I’m… Another reason I didn’t want to do this whole measurements and get the blood work is because I already almost eat all bacon. I’m pretty meat-centric, and I eat, almost every day, sausage and bacon, or sausage and eggs, or bacon and eggs, and I’m very healthy.

So I know it’s not going to be an issue there, so that’s kind of the other reason I didn’t want to do it, because it won’t really prove anything other than that my health won’t change at all.

Mike Kirsch: Well, as long as you’ve got those priorities straight. Now, Tip Top Meats. You blogged about going to Tip Top Meats in good old Carlsbad, where it looked like they had a large supply of not just bacon, but actually whole slab bacon. I’m curious if you’ve been there several times this month already, and if there’s any other favorite haunts that you’re checking out in your quest to only eat bacon.

Mike Nelson: I ate the slab bacon pretty quickly. I tore through that. One of the other problems is my family will steal my bacon… Even though they’re not on this pure bacon diet, they still feel that it’s OK to grab my bacon.

So I tore through the slab bacon fairly quickly, and I’ve had kind of a busy week, so I’ve only been supermarket bacon shopping, and it hasn’t yielded as fine of bacons as I would have liked. Nobody’s stocked up with too many good bacons. I’ve lived on the Ralphs and Kroger’s brand of supermarket bacon for the last few days, so I’m looking for a change now.

Mike Kirsch: Yeah, that’s great. I’m a fan of the Albertsons bacon myself, in their meat department, they have a pretty good cut there.

Mike Nelson: I was going to stop by there this evening on my way home. I was also looking for… I’m told that Albertson’s has Farmland bacon, so I’m excited to try that out. There’s been some good reviews of that.

Mike Kirsch: Oh. I can’t wait to see what you have to say about it. Now, one of our readers wrote in and told us about something called the Bacon Quotient. They said it’s a measurement indicating the amount of bacon an individual has to consume before he doesn’t want any more bacon. There are some anecdotal reports of some people topping out at four pounds, pre-cooked.

[laughter]

Mike Kirsch: Do you have any interest in testing for your own Bacon Quotient sometime this month?

Mike Nelson: I probably will. I was going to have some people over from the RiffTrax people. I was going to make bacon cups for them, where I make a little basket of bacon and then fill it with bacon. It’s like a salad, where you can eat the bacon inside it like a salad bowl, and then you can eat the bacon. So that might be a good time to do that, to test out the actual limits.

I did a really informal experiment once. I was up at a camp, or at a cabin, with a bunch of guys. We all had our kids. They were mostly teenaged kids. We just cooked as much bacon as the kids would eat. We all happened to bring many, many pounds of it, so we just kept cooking it for hour after hour. We ran out of bacon before their capacity to eat it stopped. We didn’t do measurements or anything, but it just ran out, literally 20 pounds of bacon, something like that.

Mike Kirsch: Wow! That is a lot of bacon. That is a ton of bacon.

Mike Nelson: The kitchen was covered in grease. It was amazing.

Mike Kirsch: That is just a fantastic thought. Well, before we wrap up with our rapid-fire four-question Baconography series, I thought maybe you might want to take just a sec to tell us a little bit about our RiffTrax blog, maybe for some of our Bacon Today readers who haven’t discovered it yet. What’s that all about?

Mike Nelson: It’s just a partner blog to our site, RiffTrax. That’s where we present… The RiffTrax are just “Mystery Science Theatre” style riffs along with movies. We do modern movies. We do old movies. We offer video-on-demands. We offer them as MP3s to do with your own DVDs. We just decided to start blogging because we’ve got a lot of talented writers.

It quickly became a bacon-centric blog, and every time a week would go by where we didn’t have something about bacon, the forums would fill up people demanding more stories. That was one of the reasons why I also just decided to satisfy the bacon need on our site and just go for it. Hopefully, this will put it to rest, although maybe it will just fuel the excitement a little bit more. Who knows?

Mike Kirsch: It probably will fuel the excitement. It’s been our experience is that there is a dedicated and just committed community of bacon lovers out there. Our readers are very, very dedicated. They’re very vocal on the site, so I’m sure you’ll only experience more of that.

Mike Nelson: [laughs] My God. We’re glad to hear it.

Mike Kirsch: Maybe that’s not what you wanted to hear.

[laughter]

Mike Kirsch: With that said, we would like to close this interview by getting the official Mike Nelson Baconography. So, here goes. What is your favorite type of bacon?

Mike Nelson: Slab bacon. Peppered slab bacon.

Mike Kirsch: Excellent. How do you like your bacon cooked?

Mike Nelson: Not too crispy. Maybe a little bit of, just the tiniest bit of, crunch in the fat. We have a little saying around our home, the explosion of fat that you get when you crunch just a little bit and then you taste the liquid fat.

Mike Kirsch: Perfect. What is your earliest bacon memory?

Mike Nelson: Oh boy. You know, it was probably an International House of Pancakes, where you could do the all-you-can-eat thing. I would just focus intently on the bacon, which was much to their chagrin, because they thought they could just flop you the pancakes and be done with it. But I would focus on the bacon.

Mike Kirsch: And the last Baconography question: what is your favorite food to accompany bacon?

Mike Nelson: Right now, it’s more bacon.

[laughter]

Mike Nelson: But on the average day, there’s no question that it’s the bacon and eggs, almost every day in my mind.

Mike Kirsch: Well, that’s just a classic.

Mike Nelson: Yeah.

Mike Kirsch: Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to give us an interview, and we wish you all the best luck in your month, in your Bacon Stupidity Month.

Mike Nelson: Thanks. It’s good to know that someone out there cares and shares the same interest. I’ll definitely be checking out your blog from now on.